Fred talked this morning about the kind of blogroll he'd like to see...

"The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother
Everything else is based on links I see on the web
I wish there was a last.fm for blogs"

That's cool, but he's really addressing a much more fundamental shift in the way we're consuming things on the web.  A blogroll is just the data exhaust of our reading habits--or should be anyway.  More and more, through Twitter, Facebook, Google reader recommendations, del.icio.us, etc. we're being driven to things on the web from other people.

At the same time, the web has a much clearer picture of who are trusted network is--Facebook friends, the people we follow on Twitter, people we link out to, etc. 

That leads me to believe that there's a much more efficient and relevant way to consume content than my feedreader, which I filled over time, needs manual curation, and literally contains everything the blogs I read care to post, regardless of quality. 

The fix for this should be simple, and here's what the app would do:

- Let me login to Twitter and Facebook.  Instead of filling my reader with feeds, I want to fill it with people.  Whatever links they tweet, share, etc. become the flow of urls to me.  Instead of the firehose of everything from your blog, or *gasp* everything from everywhere like Friendfeed, I want to see the things you want to spend the social capital to share.  When you share something, you're investing with your social capital and if you continuously share irrelevant or low quality stuff, you'll lose it and people will stop following you.  The filter of knowing that you'll be taking attention from your network improves quality by an order of magnitude.

- Analyze it.  Screen for uncommonly appearing words, del.icio.us tags, blog post tags, etc. and pay attention to what topics are trending not only for me, but within my network of what my friends are reading.

- Filter it.  I've been pretty impressed with the PostRank widget on my blog and its ability to callout the best posts I've written lately.  It's pretty obvious what they're doing--looking at tags, Diggs, comments, etc...  but that's the important metadata we should use to figure out if something's worth looking at. 

- Mobilize it.  Give me either various clients so I can subscribe anywhere (and sync it up) or just a single feed so I can subscribe from anything I'm already using.

- Expose it.  Like Fred asked for, I want widgets showing most popular links from my network, best sources, and even aggregated data on most interesting content overall--a TechMeme for every tag. 

- Monetize it.  Give me the choice for a free version with sponsored links (links that people paid to get into my feed) or a subscription version w/o sponsored links. 

This is the way I want to consume content. 

Wither New York City's Silicon Alley? from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

nextNY is doing three awesome talks in February.

On Thursday, February 5th, Jason Schwartz is running an event for community managers.  Just what is community management?  Who should be doing it?  What are best practices?  Find out from the folks who do it for startups like Etsy,

Then, on Thursday, February 19th, Jeff Stewart and Mark LaRosa are going to help startups figure out their sales strategies, sales hiring, and incentive programs.

Got an idea for a web startup, but have no idea about the technical implementation?  Some CTO's and technically inclined founders from local startups are making themselves available on February 23rd for an event on technology for business people--helping you cut through the buzzwords and rumors to help you focus and get your idea built.

Here's the key:

All of these events are free.

All of them cost us nothing to provide.  The venues and the time of the participants were donated.

So what does this mean if you're a professional society?  If you're in the business of essentially charging for live content, business connections, and professional development?  How do you compete with a self organized group of professionals who are providing, for free, similar resources that you do using the resources they already have--each other?

We have a free job board and a blog, too.  A paid professional society of young entrepreneurs would really find it hard pressed to compete against free.

So how did it happen and what does it mean for the professional society model?  Sure, we're all tech geeks and it's going to be easier for us to self-organize, but when you can find people on Meetup, LinkedIn, and Twitter, how long before other industries catch up?

About three years ago, I wanted to meet more members of my professional community--that being the emerging members of the NYC technology and innovation scene.  I was working for Union Square Ventures, a local venture capital firm, which enabled me to meet a lot of smart entrepreneurs, developers, and industry folks in my peer group, but nothing really brought us together as a community.  At the time, in February of 2006, we had a growing Meetup, but was basically about showcasing companies.  There was NYSIA, but that was an industry group with an expensive fee that most entrepreneurs and startups couldn't afford.

I decided it would be cool to invite some of the peers I had met out for a drink.  I thought it would be cool if 20 people got together once a month at a bar.

As it turned out, 75 people showed up that first night.  Since I didn't have time to manage these people (not being in the business of community myself), I threw everyone on a Google Groups listserv.  For our website, rather than use a centrally managed platform that I would have the burden of populating, we used an open wiki.

Eventually, the growing group clamored for more than just social events.  They wanted their professional questions answered.  How do I raise money for my startup?  Do I need a patent? 

Out necessity, not having a budget and knowing my hungry entrepreneur audience, I tried to put events together for free.  It was surprisingly easy.  Law firms and real estate firms were more than willing to lend us conference rooms for space, since they wanted to get in front of our community, and experienced entrepreneurs and businesspeople were more than happy to share their knowledge. 

It's really an interesting group.  We have no legal entity.  There are no titles and there is no hierarchy.  A few of us have various passwords to the web stuff, but that's about it.  Our blog has an editorial policy and it aggregates the NYC tech related posts of the members--no central voice.  There is a pretty strict no self-marketing rule on the listserv to prevent spam and to encourage selfless participation.

What's key to the group now is that we've really turned a corner in terms of leadership.  The fact that we're doing three events this month, and that I came up with the idea and am the lead person behind exactly zero of them is an accomplishment--one that groups and organizations should really aim for.  If your platform can't inspire those participating in it to want to take a leadership role, what are the chances anyone's going to want to pay for it?

I've been thinking a little bit lately about the NYT and the Kindle, and wondering why you can't just get the newspaper on this increasingly popular device.  Nicholas Carson wrote yesterday about how just giving everyone Kindles would be cheaper than printing and delivering the paper.  Then he wrote:

"Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues..."

That's when it hit me.  Why on earth doesn't the Kindle have an ad platform?

It's funny because an auther recently asked me about how she could make a little money from distribution of her e-book about careers online, and she said that she had seen some professional development books for students that had been sponsored by companies looking to recruit.   I told her about all the problems with print advertising--the fact that it wasn't measureable at all.

So, if print is going to die because you can't measure the ads and they're not compelling, then why is aren't electronic readers like the Kindle opening up ad platforms?

Imagine that every other NYT article on the Kindle comes with a targeted ad that you have to skip past to read.  That's not so bad... and if you really don't want to see the ads, you can become a subscriber.  The ads would be pretty targeted, because Kindle knows you who are, and knows what else you're reading.  In fact, Amazon knows quite a lot about you and an Amazon ad platform should have a lot of data about you to work with.  They could add the data from their payments system as well. 

This could make Amazon a serious player in the advertising market--a viable threat to Google's market share of ad spend.   Am I missing something here?

Link:  Can Music Sales Get Any Worse? Just Watch | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Let's see...

The music industry was 5 years late in giving consumers the ability to download music legally.

They spend more time suing people who want music than innovating around better delivery.

They shut down anyone who tries to innovate. 

I don't think it's really the economic slowdown that's the real issue here.

Besides, given that they're selling a digital asset, and that word of mouth has never ever been as fast and as cheap, shouldn't they still be making record profits despite 20% off the top?

I was at the GM pension plan when we took a piece of the Time Warner Music buyout.  In the first year, Thomas H. Lee Partners was able to take gobs and gobs of cash out of the business in pure overhead--consolidation of labels, cutting bloated marketing spend.

The music industry, like the auto industry, is going to have to learn to do more with less. 

Let me make one thing clear.  No one, save for maybe violent criminals or fraudulent corporate CEOs, should ever be stalked or spit on.  That's wrong.

That being said, Mike Arrington's crybaby act is a joke.  

He said his job "isn't much fun anymore" so he's taking time off. 

Mike, I don't know if you realize, but a lot of people's jobs aren't fun at all.  (We're trying to change that with Path 101--sneak preview of new features here!) They work and keep their mouth shut because they feel lucky to have a job in the first place--because over 350,000 people have lost their jobs at Fortune 500 companies alone since November, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more at smaller companies.

Your job is hard because someone spit on you and now you need to take a month off?

Try teaching.  Between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers at school were reported. On average, in each year from 1996 to 2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at school, and 3 out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime (i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault).

Violent crime, not spit.

And most teachers don't drive Porsches either...

... or you could be a cop.  In 2008, 140 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the US... and that was way down from normal.

Hell, I mean... who cleans the bathroom at the Techcrunch office?  Whoever it is would no doubt trade their job and salary for yours, spit, death threats, and all--seeing as they probably live in a neighborhood where too many people own guns and carry them--and don't just call around and send letters, nor do their register their guns.

As for the stalking incident that affected your family--that's really frightening, and awful. 

However, it has little to do with your job or the fact that you're a public persona.  According to the National Center For The Victims Of Crime, 1 out of every 12 women will be stalked during her lifetime.  1 out of 45 men will be stalked during his lifetime.  Over one million women, and nearly 380,000 men are stalked annually.   

I'm pretty sure most of these people aren't on the Technorati top bloggers list.  The fact of the matter is, stalkers typically don't go after public figures.  You just happen to be unfortunate enough to have won (or lost) the stalker lottery--but be thankful you have the clout and financial means to protect yourself.  Not everyone can afford $2000/day security.  This woman sure couldn't.

So, while the circumstances of his sabbatical are unfortunate, I'm glad to see him go, and so are a lot of other people. 

Why? 

Because he's an asshole--and everyone knows it.

You see, while the stalking incident is random and unfortunate, the fact that people don't like him--that's pretty much his own fault, not Kara's or Nick's. 

The guy is completely obnoxious and turns legitimate business stories into personal vendettas--whether it's against the tech team at Twitter (hmm...  business model questions aside, Twitter doesn't seem so "amateur" anymore now that they've turned the uptime corner, huh?), overzealous PR professionals, or competing tech conferences.   His professional behavior is that of a schoolyard bully, and funny enough, like most schoolyard bullies, his leave of absence proves one thing:

He can dish it, but he can't take it.

You can't have it both ways, Mike.  Your business *thrives* on controversy.  You've profited from the fame, and like a celebrity who pushes the camera paparazzi away, even though they always *amazingly* seem to know exactly where those celebrities will be, you want the upside but you don't want the risk.

But taking responsibility for downside risk has never been your forte, has it?  Anyone remember Edge.io?   In one year, the company he founded blew through $5 million "according to plan" without any significant traction whatsoever.  His Deadpool post almost made it seem like he was just an angel investor and not the key guy.  That's very different from how it seemed when I was on the receiving end of his pitch and demo back when I was at USV. 

Not surprisingly, it was one of the most kid gloved deadpool posts ever--almost as kidgloved as he treats Seesmic, one of his investments.  When a company with no business model and very little traction raises $12 million, this should be grade A Haterington fodder, but he totally let's them off easy.  "Le Meur says the company isn’t in dire financial trouble yet".  What?  No response to that, Mike?  I'm sorry, but just because you have two years of runway doesn't mean you're not in trouble if that runway ends off a cliff--it's just delaying the inevitable. 

Controversy, conflict, and a generally unprofessional attitude follows Arrington wherever he goes--as does an army of fanboys whose numbers are nothing more than a useless distraction to PR and startup folks alike.  I'm glad to see the distraction gone, hope he doesn't return, and that we can all get back to the business of trying to survive in these difficult times--trying to figure out how to build great things that paying customers, not fanboys, see value in.

In the meantime, if you'd like alternative reading to TechCrunch, I highly suggest checking out Mashable--if for no other reason than the way that Pete Cashmore runs his business.  I talked to Pete at SXSW last year about the culture of Mashable.  He makes sure his team tries to stay above the hate and the controversy, because that's just not the kind of business he wants to run.  Pete's a genuine guy, and while the camera follows him around because he's a helluva lot better looking than his TechCrunch counterpart, he also spends quite a fair bit of flying around making quiet visits to his real friends completely under the radar--something Arrington probably wouldn't understand.

And it's paying off.  You wouldn't know it by Mike's holier-than-thou attitude, but Mashable's traffic and growth is right up there with TechCrunch, despite the fact that it focuses on a narrower vertical.

So it's true...  You can actually be successful and not be an asshole.  How about that? 

So Bush is gone, Arrington is gone...   Maybe 2009 is going to be better than we think!

Incorrectly valuing assets--that's basically what this financial collapse comes down to. All the stuff we thought we had--our houses, mortgages, and all the wacky financial derivatives we layered on top of them--turned out to not be worth that much.

Now that prices have fallen off a cliff, investors are out searching for undervalued assets. There's one asset out there that few people are talking about that is severely undervalued in a bad economy--and its the one thing that has the most potential to get you through 2009 in one piece.

Your body.

It's actually the only asset we ever truly own. Our ownership of most of our other stuff is pretty tenuous--and often highly leveraged, making it a missed payment away from being taken away. Your body, on the other hand, is always yours. In fact, the government even prevents you from selling it.

It is the physical instrument by which we carry out everything that flows through our various digital lifestreams--it is the source of the lifestreams.

This really hit home for me when I found out that a friend of mine and fellow entrepreneur, Tim Marman, told me that he has cancer--fortunately a highly curable form, but still... It made me realize how much I have invested in and depend on my body to carry me through the day--and how much my employees and investors are riding on it, too.

That's why, if there's any one thing I think we need to focus more on over the next year--it's taking care of our physical selves. We're going to need those few extra minutes of lucid thinking a day and that extra spring in our step when we're trying to make a flight to a customer. We can't afford extra sick days, financially and just in terms of meeting ever increasing professional expectations.

Does that mean we all need to run a five minute mile? No, but how about trying to break a 10 minute mile...or just get out and walk a mile?  Unplug and treat your lungs to some fresh air--and maybe have a new idea or two while you're away from the screen.

Additionally, I'm stunned to see anyone--let alone relatively smart people who should know better--smoke nowadays.  To me, taking investor money from people who invested in you and smoking is like taking their money to buy a server and just kicking it once a day...maybe after lunch.  You are an asset just as much as the machines are--and there are much more effective ways of destressing that don't make you smell like you've been eating matches all day. 

For those of you who think that self abuse is part of the deal--no sleep and Ramen make startup happy--start reassessing not only whether or not this is truly sustainable--but how, in ways you might not realize, you're actually doing more harm to your startup than good.  Fuzzy thinking, bad first impressions, missed appointments--when you act like you are duct taped together, then your company appears duct taped together and, not surprisingly, duct tape will be the only think you can afford.

So before you get freaked out over competitor on TechCrunch or writing a marketing plan for the first time in your life, start with priority one--your physical self... and move outward from there.  Look at yourself in the mirror.  Forget about whether your nose is too big or you're losing your hair--just assess whether or not you look well taken care of.  Are you putting as much care into yourself as you are into server optimization?  Sleep well, eat right, exercise, and then try to change the world with AJAX and APIs--don't put the cart before the horse.  

What's one thing that you can do over the next year to optimize your own physical self?

Year after year, the US spits out a few million college kids looking for jobs.  The whole recruiting process is built around the idea of matching--that there are enough openings to digest everyone into the workforce and its just a matter of matching the right people to the right positions.

Well, what if there are no openings come this May--literally none.  No job postings.  No on campus interviews.  No job fairs.  This isn't a fantasy.  It's happening right now.  Even the companies that are showing up to job fairs aren't hiring--they're just there for branding. Let's not even talk about the number of people getting laid off everyday.

You know what that makes all these students, and everyone else out there in the job market...

...besides screwed?

Entrepreneurs.

That's when you are when you have a product--yourself--that you are solely responsible for.  You have to discover, target, and pitch your prospects to survive.  It's like a new market where there aren't any established sales channels and you've got to convince your first customer that spending money with you will bear both immediate and future benefit.

This is something few have ever been taught how to do--how to get someone to fight for you in the budget because they really need you.  Anyone can get a job when there's an opening, but can you get a company to create a position for you after they just cut 15% of their staff?

Enter the era of sink or swim--with a newfound focus on taking personal responsibility for outcomes.  I'm seeing two types of people out on the job market right now.  Some people are sitting by the phone waiting for offers or even interviews and other people are getting out there doing the interviewing themselves--informational interviews--and trying to drum up a sale.  I suggested to a young professional last week that they get a blog with their own domain. Then I saw "learning about nameservers" (part of the technical process of getting a custom URL for your blog) in their Twitter account. That person doesn't have to do a lot to convince me that they will make an immediate and positive ROI impact at their next job--and that's the only thing that's going to matter in his economy.

"How are you going to help us make more money than we're spending on you?" is an interview question too few of us are prepping for.  It's not just a matter of having the right answer, but also having the skills to back it up.  Do you know exactly what skills you'd need to have to get fought for in a budget meeting while layoffs are going on? 

Its the same as a piece of advice that David Kidder gave a group of entrepreneurs from nextNY:

"Get in the jetstream of revenue in your space--find out where people are making real money and find a way to get a piece of that."

Thinking about yourself on those terms--how you're going to have a direct impact on your next company's bottom line as a revenue stream, not just a cost center is thinking like an entrepreneur. 

The other think I think jobseekers can borrow from entrepreneurial thinking is that entrepreneurs often form communities to help each other out.  Helping other people with their job searches can build up your social capital and karma (which can come back to help you later), get you thinking about your career in different ways, and also help get your name out there.   Plus, after a while, it can get really tiring doing your own job search and sometimes you need to pull away from the screen for a moment.  Grabbing coffee with a friend who is thinking about their own career is akin to something entrepreneurs do all the time to brainstorm--and can often give both people a host of new and useful ideas.

That's why one of the things we're working on at Path 101 is a career advice network--where people who have jobs and also those looking can reach out to targeted people and ask career questions.  There's really no substitute for the accrued wisdom of someone who has been there.  It's something I encourage my entrepreneurship students to do all the time--to reach out to other people to learn. 

Not to make this too much of a pitch, but creating a people resource that can provide career guidance is an important part of Path 101 and an exciting part of our original vision.  It's something I've strived to create over and over again, through various mentoring programs I started or ran, nextNY, etc.  If you have a moment, I'd love your participation.  You can register here and choose how often you're willing to receive targeted career questions.  The questions will be directed to a number of professionals in a particular industry--so no worries if you can't answer all of them.  You can even ask and answer anonymously if you'd like.  We're trying to build up the advisor base as large and diverse as possible, if you could pass it on to a few people, especially across other industries, that would be amazing. 

At the end of the day, 2009 is going to be a very difficult year for jobseekers and entrepreneurs alike, but it really comes down to two things--helping yourself first and then also making time to help those around you.  Sitting back and waiting for opportunities will leave you far behind.

People keep talking about the decrease in venture investing, and how the VC financing model is out of whack:

"Because venture funds invest not just in all the wrong places, ignoring clear supply and demand signals - but, worse, in all the wrong and same places. Where one pioneer invests, a slew of imitators follow, and so tremendous amounts of cash are poured into the same business design or market space - ad exchanges, social networks, and blogging/vlogging platforms to name just a few recent fads. That striking homogeneity reflects an almost total lack of strategic imagination by venture players."

- Umair Haque via Kortina.

Umair wrote about this twice--here and here.  Umair's a smart guy, but, like a lot of other people, he keeps blaming this on VCs.  Is it me, or aren't the entrepreneurs the ones who are supposed to be innovating and creating markets, not VCs?  VCs don't innovate.  They fund the innovation of entrepreneurs.  When I hear "lack of innovation", I'd guess there's a problem with the source, not the source of funding.

He piles on with the VC finger pointing:

"Why does President-elect Obama have to invest a likely trillion dollars to renew... auto, energy, healthcare, education, finance, and agricultural industries... Because today's crop of apathetic, risk-averse venture investors didn't."

"How many new industries or markets have venture funds created in the last decade?"

"...tomorrow's sources of advantage remain largely unexplored - because venture investors have been systematically underinvesting in discovering them"

When I hear people complaining about VC's and the venture capital model, my first thought is, "Are there amazing, innovative companies not getting funded because there's something wrong with the VC model?  Is there a viable entrepreneur with a groundbreaking idea who can't get cash for it?  Who??"

Honestly, most people's ideas just aren't that good... and then even if you have a good idea, the chances the you have the means to turn it into a real business is pretty slim.  Frankly, I'm amazed that any profitible new and innovative companies *ever* get build--its not easy.  The idea, though, that such businesses exist, but outside of the scope of what "lemming" VCs tend to invest in is pretty ridiculous.

He keeps bringing up the auto industry, but aren't there a bunch of VCs in Tesla?  Is there reason why that's the only auto startup I know of a function of unwilling VCs or is it a lack of capable entrepreneurs willing, able or interested in starting a car company from scratch?

Umair has never sat on the other side of venture capital deal flow.  Trust me, it isn't pretty.  It's not the VCs that are myopic--it's us entrepreneurs.  We're the problem.  We're the ones coming up with the "me, too!" businesses, and before you say, "Well, that's because that's what is getting funded", if you're an entrepreneur who creates businesses based on what you think a VC will fund versus things like value creation, potential for distruption, your own passion, then I'm not really sure how successful an entrepreneur you're likely to be.

Just look at entrepreneurship education in this country.  We spend more time teaching entrepreneurs how to write business plans than we teach them about passion (or teach them how to fuel it) or about the underlying technologies they're supposed to innovate with in the first place.

When I look at stats that say that VC investment is down, I think first about how deal flow is probably down, too.  When the economy turns, the liklihood that someone with a good idea is going to take a risk and jump from their cushy job somewhere goes down, too--understandably so.  I see lots of people complaining about the lack of financing out there, but honestly, I haven't seen one single deal that cannot get financed because VC doors are shut, VCs are risk averse, VCs are stupid, etc.  There are some deals that got financed on previously screwy terms and entrepreneurs might not want to take a round that reflects current market conditions.  That's a different story.  But seriously, where are the amazing ideas that can't get money?

I've hardly seen any innovation in the education space.  This is not a VC problem.  Most of the education ideas I've seen are marketplaces for learning and the most innovation I've seen in learning recently is on YouTube and Slideshare.

The tendency to blame the people with the money in this country is rampant.  We blame the Wall St. collapse on "greedy CEOs" and "predetory lenders".  Seriously?  I don't recall any lenders physically threatening me to try and get me to take their balloon payment/ARM combo loan back in '05 when I bought my condo.  Silly me.  You know what I did?  I made myself a financial model to figure out what my payments would be and made sure I could afford my payments.

Even this Madoff mess.  The fact that people threw the bulk of their savings to one money manager, even though they couldn't explain how he was making money, is ridiculous. 

If anything is going to change in this country, it needs to start with personal responsibility.  Don't invest in things you don't understand.  Don't eat more calories than you can reasonably burn off.  Don't blame VCs for not backing you when your idea isn't particularly innovative or doesn't have potential. 

Umair's posts get quite a fair bit of traffic...  You'd think that he'd be seeing the occasional groundbreakingly innovative entrepreneur with a great idea and he'd post a few times and say, "Like this company... here's my example... great idea, but VC's are too stupid or risk averse to invest in it."

I think it's very telling that the people who complain that VCs don't invest in the right stuff can't put to exactly what ideas they should be investing in. 

"Detroit should take a page out of Pittsburgh's playbook. In the 1980s, the state used local universities to pour funds into technology research. What blossomed was a thriving entrepreneurial community. The largest industries? Computer software, biotechnology, education and health care, all of which have held up well of late.

To be sure, Pittsburgh reinvented itself during a run of prosperity. It didn't happen overnight and it didn't happen without a tremendous amount of federal, state and local support and vision. Skilled workers who couldn't make a living in Pittsburgh moved elsewhere, to thriving cities like Phoenix and Vegas."

L A Z E R O W . COM: Will you be Pittsburgh or will you be Detroit?

So I've been chatting with a lot of local city government folks about ensuring that NYC thrives as an innovation center--and I've yet to hear how any of these plans tie into education at all.  All the governmental types are worried about money and space, but if there are no brains to feed with the money and no brains to put in the spaces, what good will it all do?

How many of you live in fear of the day when your favorite media sharing service, be it a blog or a photo or video site, sends out the dreaded "Download your crap before Tuesday because  we're shutting down" message?

With monetization of many sites proving somewhat difficult, its only a matter of time before more of them go belly up.

Or what if it's not a belly up--but just a fuckup.  You think your photos are safe at Yahoo?  Given all the upheaval and turnover at Yahoo!, Flickr is nothing short of a PR nightmare waiting to happen. 

"All your photos are gone.  Ooops!"

I feel the same way about Typepad.  It's pretty hard to replace nearly five years of blogposts, and I'm sure there's probably some way I can export them every so often, but that's a pain.

The major flaw is built into the hosted web services model--the hosting is always tied into the service.  I recently rediscovered the awesome editing ability of the Motionbox service--but do I trust they'll be around forever and be a safe place to keep my stuff?  Not so much--and that's the hurdle that a lot of these startups face.  People aren't willing to trust their valuable bits to an unprofitable startup.  Enterprise startups face the same issue, with corporate CIO's telling companies "Sure I'd like to roll you out across the company, but what happens if you guys don't make it."

I'd like to see more companies start reselling me storage at Amazon.  I trust that Amazon, tied to a boring old e-commerce cash cow, will be around.  I'd be more willing to try new media sharing services if I knew that they were all just a layer on top of my existing choice of cloud storage.

As an alternative, how about a service that backs up all of my online media to Amazon automatically.  We already have Mozy for desktop docs, but more and more of our lives are going online.

As it turns out, my friend Rob May is building just that--Lifestream Backup.  The service isn't live yet, but it will be soon.  So if you're concerned about your Flickr photos, Facebook shots, videos, blogposts, etc... Check out their quick survey and sign up to get notified when they're live. 

The whole idea of Salesforce--a hosted, scalable service that grows with you from a single user to thousands of people--is great, but in practice, it's really not conducive to being used at a startup.  I logged into Salesforce today for the first time in a while... and I'm very close to just cancelling my account and considering it a failed experiment--at least for this startup.

The Professional Edition I'm using is advertised as "Full-powered CRM without complexity", but because it's not full-powered, some of the tools out there that could make it less complex to use aren't available to me.

Salesforce is undoubtedly a great product for larger organizations.  I've seen it implemented with great zeal at Oddcast, where the name of the game was sales to agencies, and everyone had Salesforce plugged into Outlook.  Return Path, the company that we're squatting at, uses it, too.  In fact, they have a couple of people dedicated to managing it--and they have a very organized process for converting lists of leads into sales opportunities. 

I'm in a very different situation now.  I'm the one non-coder at my startup--and hence the only person with a Salesforce account.  Most of my "deals" are more about strategic partnerships than revenue, and so it's hard to quantify the value of using a CRM.  Even so, I put a lot of effort into loading and tagging all my contacts so I could use it, and setting up custom fields.  I was determined to be very organized about our opportunity management.

It didn't work, for a couple of reasons--mostly having to do with the creation of new contacts.

One of the most valuable features of Salesforce is to be able to attach e-mail interactions to contacts.  The only problem is they have to be existing contacts.  When you're a startup, however, most of your interactions are going to be with new people.  Constantly adding new contacts to Salesforce when you're the lone business guy at your company is a tremendous time sink, not to mention difficult to keep up with. 

But there's hope--but only if you can afford it.

For one, Salesforce is easier to use if you can plug it into your e-mail client--only how many startups do you know that are using Outlook?  Tons of startups are using Thunderbird, but Salesforce doesn't support it.  Granted, Thunderbird doesn't have nearly the installed base that Outlook does, but the base that it does have is a key innovation community that Salesforce should want as clients.   There is an effort for a community developed plugin, but it only works with the set of APIs that Salesforce makes available to its Enterprise and above versions...  i.e. at $1500 per year per user.  Sorry, I just can't afford that.

It's odd because the very features that make it easier to use are only available to companies who can actually afford to have someone managing and inputting contacts.

That's not the only useful tool that can only be accessed with that version.  The awesome folks at iHance have created an automatic contact creator.  I saw it demoed and it's nothing short of a Godsend!  You bcc your in and outbound e-mails to it (solving the lack of Thunderbird support issue) and for any e-mail contacts it doesn't recognize, it keeps them all in a holding pen for you to create new contacts with a dropdown and a click.  So, what used to take almost a minute for each new contact, can now take a minute in total for all your new contacts.

Unfortunately, the APEX API's needed to make this functional don't work in the Professional version I'm using, which isn't cheap either. 

If you've ever signed up for Salesforce, you'll realize why there's no freemium version--everything they do is insanely high touch.  You can't even sign up without getting a phone call from them.  I wanted to try to add on Windows Mobile support, and I have to type my name and number into a field so someone can call me.  I'm one person!  Trust me, Salesforce, it's not worth the phone call--especially if you don't have a level of service most startups can reasonably afford and tools they can use.

I'm currently looking into PipelineDeals, which looks pretty cool, but they've got that same contact creation issue.  I don't want to spend all my business development time typing new contacts into a database.  To their credit, though, they have a much more startup-friendly pricing structure and no contract lock-ins, unlike Salesforce. 

Here's the reality.  There are a lot of people out of work right now, and there will be more.  Unless you have some kind of technical skill, like brain surgery, web development or you can do some kind of theoretical math that no one else can, chances are there's someone out there more qualified than you or who went to a better school than you do--probably a quite few people in fact. 

The idea that you're going to get a job by dusting off your resume and uploading it to Monster is a pipe dream.  Even worse is trying to apply to the few job ads out there. 

Job ads are like crack.  Applying to each one is like getting a little hit.  It feels good that you're doing something, but ultimately they don't get you anywhere.  I once posted 12 positions for a company and got back 3,000 resumes.   The odds are not in your favor.

But if you apply to enough, someone will certainly see your resume and respond, no? 

Go ahead--apply to all of them.  That's what everyone else is doing--and half of all resumes that get sent to companies, maybe more, never ever get looked at by anyone.  There might not even be a real job behind that ad.  While you're at it, you might as well play the lottery.  At least someone wins the lottery, eventually.

If all you have is a resume, you're toast.  Your resume isn't special and it's not the best one.

Welcome to trying to get a job in the middle of a recession.

Oh, and e-mailing it around to all your friends?  If you look up "wreaks of desperation" in the dictionary, you'll see a page with an attached resume.  When I get unsolicited resumes from people I barely know in my inbox, I feel like I want to treat it like someone just handed me their dirty socks.  "Umm...  ew...  I know a good place for this..."

The problem with that is that the chances that someone you know is looking for your resume is so slim--plus asking them to send it around is kind of like asking them to spam people.  No one asked for your resume, so why are you sending it around?   Instead, take the time to figure out what it is your friends do, target the ones in areas you want to work in, and ask to chat with them on the phone or buy them coffee.  THEN, follow up with a resume, IF they ask for it.  That shows you know how to treat people like people, not like e-mail addresses, and you can go the extra mile to market something--yourself.  If you just blindly e-mail a bunch of people and expect a positive response, am I to assume this is how you'll act on that sales job a recommend you for?

Wake up.

You need to treat this job search like you seriously want the job--and that's going to take a different approach, some serious get off your ass effort and a little bit of time.

First off, let's be clear.  I get that you need to pay your rent and you need a job yesterday.  That's no excuse for approaching your job search like a mindless lemming--rushing to jump over the same cliff as everyone else who is out of a job.

Do what you need to do to take care of your financial priorities.  This is why it's good to have a few months savings built up.  If not, you need sure up your finances.  Immediately cut unnecessary expenses, but be careful not to cut too much--especially not the kinds of things that will de-stress you or get you out of the house everyday.  So, if you're choosing between cable and the gym...you might want to go without the tube for a while.  Sitting idly on the couch will not get you a job and will most likely make you feel bad about your situation after a while.  Besides, most of your favorite shows are available on the web for free now anyway.

The gym, however, can be a place to meet people and an excuse to get out of the house.  You need to get out there and meet lots of people, and looking refreshed and healthy goes a long way.  Get some sleep while you're at it, too... But don't sleep in--hit the sack early.  If you're sleeping in and not getting out of the house until noon, you're missing out on hours of potential job searching and networking time.

As for finances, don't be afraid to take paid work on a temporary basis wherever you can get it, even it's part time or not in your field--as long as you don't take your eye off the ball when it comes to really trying to get a job you want, in your field.  Despite the urgency of your situation, you can set your career back years if you take the wrong job just because you have to, and then give up looking for something else.  You should always be looking for better opportunities.  If you need to tap into savings, sell some extra stuff or move into a smaller place (or get a roommate) do what you can to ease your current financial situation--because being stuck in a hard financial spot can throw on a lot of pressure that will make getting a job (like being cool, calm, and collected on an interview) more difficult.

Ok, now for actually getting a job.  Let's think about supply and demand in this market.  Right now, companies have the ability to get just about anyone they want--so the question is, "Why would someone want me?"  You're probably not going to pick up some new skill between now and your next potential job interview, so the reality is that whatever skills and experience you have is what you're going into battle with.

So what else is there?

How about reputation?  Put yourself in the shoes of the person hiring.  You've probably been around a hire or had to hire someone yourself.  What's the first thing people do when they want to hire someone?  They go to their immediate network of trusted connections and see if there's anyone who might be a fit.  This happens even before they dive into the resume pile of people who are out of work--which isn't a very appealing task for most employers.

So the key is getting your name out there, far and wide, so that when that question goes out, you immediately come to mind.   How do you make sure that key people associate your name with the position you want?

Here are a few ways... and you should try all of them:

1) Be a leader among people just like you.  So you're out of work, or maybe you're just stuck at a cruddy job and you're looking to move up or chance paths.  Maybe you're interested in a hard to get into profession.  Either way, there are lots of people out there just like you, and if you can't just flat out beat them with your resume--then lead them.  You should get active in whatever professional society is relevant to your field.  Professional societies are always looking for more active members, especially if they can help out with events.  If there isn't a professional society, then start a Meetup.  Get other people with similar interests together in one place, and then reach out to experienced professionals to invite as speakers--or just to come to your networking events.  A friend of mine created a group for professionals interested in digital media as it relates to museums and cultural institutions, and in less than a month, it has nearly 100 members already.  What this does is not only places her in the mind of 100 industry professionals as an up and comer and community leader, but also when it comes to interviewing for jobs in this space, she has this unique feather in her cap.  She can say that she runs the Meetup for the very same professionals a company is looking to hire!

2) Informational interviews.  No, this doesn't mean going around asking people to hire you.  It means thinking of this job search as an excuse to get to know a lot of professionals.  If you're out of work, you should be meeting with, at minimum, three people a day for purely informational purposes--to learn about the different areas of your interest.  Don't go into a job interview not knowing exactly what's going on in a field.  Go in having talked to a dozen people over the last week about exactly what's needed for success and how the industry is changing.  Again, that shows interest, ambition, and it looks so much better than the person who can only say they've just been applying to a lot of jobs when asked, "What have you been doing?"   With each interview, ask the person for one or two recommendations of who else to talk to.  Never ever try to push your resume on someone... if they hear of something for you, they'll ask.  Resumes put pressure on people that they need to have an immediate job for you, versus just having a conversation. 

3) Keep your digital presence fresh, interesting, and up to date.  Be where people are online.   I told an out of work friend that she should start a blog about the tools she's using to organize herself online, since she needs to get organized to get her job search moving, and she's looking to be an interactive media producer--a position that demands a lot of organization.  She told me that she needs a job now, and doesn't have time to start a blog.   This is really short sighted, because what happens on the off chance that someone actually does find her resume and immediately googles her name.  Would she rather her smartly written organization blog be up there first, or just her Facebook profile with her silly profile picture--making her look like one of millions of other faces and resumes.  Whenever you get in contact with someone, be it asking for a job or an informational interview, they're going to check you out online, so you need to make sure you have a solid digital presence.  This can accomplish many things for you:

- It makes you seem more savvy than others who don't use these tools.

- It gives you an opportunity to write and share thoughts that can't be captured on just a resume--like a portfolio for a knowledge worker.  If you were a photographer, you'd unquestionably have an online portfolio available, so as someone being hired for your sharp business mind or what have you, where's your portfolio?  Your thoughts and options about your industry, or just about the tools you're learning about, represent an interesting aspect of you that a resume won't adequately put on display.

- It makes you more searchable.  If you use the right keywords, your blog will get a lot of search traffic after a while--and someone searching for an expert on organizing political communities might find your "How to organize a group of politically active people" post, if that's what you're interesting in.

It's also important to make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date, and you've got your real life network on there.   Here's a post about getting started on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is a great rainy day fund for people.  Use it to seek out informational interviews, find out if you have connections at places you're applying, and see what companies and what professionals are in your space.

A great listening tool (and publishing, if you feel like sharing) to see what professionals are talking about in your area is Twitter.  Twitter is a social network where people share shortform status updates, like where they're going or what they're reading, etc.  Knowing that there's a media exec on Twitter going to a particular event when you know you want to work at that company can be a significant advantage in the job search.  Tools like Mr Tweet can and Twitter search can help you figure out who to follow.

Want other ideas?

How about starting a project--the kind you want to get paid to do--on your own.  If you want someone to pay you to work for their advertising company, how about offering up some of your best thinking around brands and advertising to a startup--or a startup a day on your blog.  By writing up short case studies of what you think certain companies and brands should do, you'll have a good shot at attracting their attention.  Or, if nothing else, you can work on some of these case studies with people you want to do informational interviews with.  I once told a guy who wanted to be an information architect to start wireframing how Twitter would sign up groups of people at a time, and then publishing that on his blog for feedback. 

A project could be managing a fake portfolio of stocks on UpDown, but taking it very seriously and publishing your results and analysis.  It would make for a great discussion with a real portfolio manager--certainly better than, "So how did you get your job?"

At the end of the day, a job search needs to be active, and you need to be using all of the innovative tools possible to help you get what you want.  If all you're doing is sending your resume around via e-mail attachment, well, expect to get a good job...  in 1998. 

A few days ago, I asked a bunch of thoughtful people I know to post 7 second video predictions for 2009.  Not everyone kept to the 7 seconds (I didn't), but that was fine.  The whole process was made a lot easier using two web services.  First, I used drop.io to create a private dropbox where people could upload their videos, but not see the others that were posted.  I have this debate with Sam, but I still think that drop.io needs to brand itself as X for Y... whatever they want to be.  I don't think they can get big enough if they're just this really flexible platform that solves random-ass geek problems, like mass uploading videos from a group of people.  They need a simpler value prop.  Still, it was perfect for what I needed.

Then, Motionbox the *only* video site I could find that would not only take all of the various video formats that were posted, but also allow easy trimming and splicing.  I was expecting to use Kaltura, but I guess they changed their model into an editing tool for other communities--and have since dropped their consumer offering.  One True Media didn't recognize a couple of the files either.  Motionbox had an easy uploader, making the whole thing a snap--but one feature request is definitely titles. It would have been nice to type titles into the video as overlays.  Still, pretty slick.

So here it is...

Embed code: <embed pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.motionbox.com/external/player/id=0a98d6b81c1ee7c787" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="375" width="425">

...and here are the participants, in order of appearance...   

Bryce Roberts - Managing Director, O'Reilly AlphaTech (@bryce)

Chris Fralic - Partner, First Round Capital (@chrisfralic)

Jim Robinson - Managing Partner, RRE Ventures (@jdrive)

Brady Forrest - Technical Evangelist, O'Reilly Media (@brady)

Charlie O'Donnell - Co-Founder & CEO, Path 101 (@ceonyc)

Whitney Hess - User Experience Designer (@whitneyhess)

Howard Lindzon - Partner, Knight's Bridge Capital Partners (@howardlindzon)

Pete Hershberg - Managing Partner, Reprise Media (@hershberg)

Hunter Walk - Director of Product Management, Google (@hunterwalk)

Howard Morgan - Partner, First Round Capital (@hlmorgan)

Josh Stylman - Managing Director, Reprise Media (@jstylman)

Sam Lessin - Co-Founder & CEO, drop.io (@lessin)

Sarah Tavel - Associate at Bessemer Venture Partners (@adventurista)

Darren Herman - Head of Digital Media, Group Director at The Media Kitchen (@dherman76)

Andy Weissman - Founder, Chief Operating Officer at betaworks (@aweissman)

Brian Harniman - EVP, Marketing & Distribution at Kayak.com

Beth Ferreira - VP, Finance and Operations, Etsy (@bethferreira)

Nate Westheimer - EIR, RoseTech Ventures (@innonate)

Janetti Chon - Community Manager, Web 2.0 Expo (@janerri)

Laurel Touby - Founder & Senior VP, Media Bistro (@laureltouby)

Fred Wilson - Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures (@fredwilson)

Kristin Maverick - Director of Communications, Carrot Creative (@kmaverick)

and...

Josh Wilson, Ladies Man

Today,Loic Le Meur blogged that "We're not equal on Twitter, as we're not equal on blogs and on the web.""  He was talking about the need for Twitter to start filtering searches by authority--and by authority he means the number of people following them.

It's laughable...the idea that someone has "authority" because a lot of people pay attention to it.  Isn't that the most anti-Web 2.0 thing you've ever heard?  Did we forget about the long tail?  Wasn't that the whole point?  Level playing field... hear the small voices...   excuse me, is this thing on?

So, mark this date down.  Today, December 27, 2008 is the day that the digerati jumped the shark--the day that a guy who raised $12 million for a video blog commenting platform with no revenues or any idea of what the business model would be told the world that he only wants to listen to Twitter users with a lot of followers.

Perhaps that was his mistake in the first place--thinking that the only people worth listening to are people who are already big into Twitter. 

A lot of companies that will not survive the next 12 months because they will not get additional funding and don't have enough user traction.  Many of these companies were fueled by echo chamber ideas--they didn't solve big enough problems for nearly enough people nor did they have any sense of where the potential business value might get created. 

Along with the creation and support of these companies, we got a cavalcade of stars--voices that were early, and built up followings for mostly that same reason--the Robert Scoble's and Mike Arrington's of the world.  They became water coolers, and in talking about new technologies that were going to overtake the establishment they became the establishment. 

I think that's when, slowly, people started realizing--these new voices we were all paying attention to weren't really all that relevent.  Ask anyone in PR what they tell their clients when they say they want to be on TechCrunch--it isn't worth it.  You'll get a firehouse of traffic that will be gone in a week, with few of the people likely to be in your target audience anyway--unless your audience is other Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

There's been an explosion in Web 2.0 "experts" and people have started carving out their own niches.  If you are a non-profit, you are much more likely to pay attention to a social media expert from the non-profit world than you are still going to listen to Steve Rubel--another key early voice.  Sure, Steve might have introduced you to blogging, but there's probably a more immediately relevent expert out there that you found using the tools that Steve taught you about.  In fact, this person probably isn't even an "expert" with a shingle--they're probably someone just like you, a working professional trying to solve an immediate business need.

So while the RSS numbers are still there for these early folks--because we all filled our RSS readers with them early on, we've actually stopped paying attention to our RSS readers nearly as much. 

We're much more likely to find worthwhile reading on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr--places where the screen in which I view the world is my friends or people I care about associating with--not the aggregate number of followers someone has. 

We're pulling back...  and the smart money listens to smaller, more focused, more immediately relevent voices--people we're likely to meet up with, share a Shack burger with, etc.  Sure, there are people with 40,000 Twitter followers, but there are over 1000 people who have more than 2700 followers.  Twitter is actually flatter than the blogosphere (and getting flatter--maybe because it's just easier), and it's not surprising.  Following a blog is a very low cost activity--having too many feeds in your feed reader is annoying, but it's not going to make you miss something cool going on right outside your door this very minute.  Follow too many on Twitter, on the other hand, and you're going to get overwhelmed quickly... or go bankrupt in SMS billing.

And the traffic is showing that we're drifting away from the early to the party folks.  Techcrunch traffic has been largely flat since June--although Mashable traffic, with more writers covering a more narrow space, with less of that patronizing, even sometimes mean, authoritative tone, continues to grow slowly but steadily.

Scobel's blog traffic appears down, and Techmeme--the water cooler of water coolers, is flat, as is Micropersuasion.

As technology increases engagment, we'll demand much more relevence...  and we're less likely to follow the water coolers just because they're the water cooler.  Most of what the masses are saying just isn't nearly as interesting as what your best friend wants to tell you or some smart person in your industry (Web 2.0 is not an industry) is talking about.

This is a good thing, btw.  We need better ideas from more people.  We don't need an authority filter--one based on sheer numbers.  We need a relevence filter...  and we're getting that--it's in our own head.  We're getting more and more likely to unfriend, unfollow, clean out, etc...  and the economy will sweep its share of noise out the door in the next year as well.  Remaining Web 2.0 compaines one year from now will be stronger, more stable, more useful--and the voices that most people pay attention to will likely be the builders--the other entrepreneurs and professionals doing your job who have encountered the same issue you have--not the sideline pundits.  There isn't much money left in being a sideline pundit anymore--just ask the newspapers. 

At the end of the day, I hope Loic gets his feature request, though--so that he can only pay attention to the other Twitter users that have as many followers as he does.  This way, he's not likely to notice when the rest of us stop paying attention to him and become our own little water coolers.

Mashable just reported that Plenty of Fish, the free dating site run by Markus Frind, is now the #1 dating site in the US, with a 17.02% share, 3-5x that of Match.com or eHarmony. 

I'm sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this.  Do you know anyone who met someone on Plenty of Fish?  (PS...  I have no doubt I'll get anonymous comments to this post... Seems such remarks, always supportive of the service, always turn up mysteriously.)  If it had 3x the share of Match, you'd think it would have at least half the brand awareness. 

Supposedly, this one man operation is netting millions of dollars of ad revenues--of this doesn't wreak of a Web 2.0 Madoff scheme, I don't know what does.

But let's think about it for a second.  What's actually going on here?  It would be irresponsible to dismiss this out of hand without some kind of logic, right?

Well, thanks to a little deductive reasoning, I've figured out exactly what's going on here.

Let's start with what we know to be real--the money.  We've seen the million dollar check, not to mention the fact that, if logic holds true, someone at Google would have commented on the situation if he wasn't making nearly what he said he was or if his checks were fake. 

So if the money's real, it's got to come from clicking traffic, right?  The question is whether or not the clicks and traffic are real or if they're fake. 

If these were all real people, you would have imagined more of a buzz among real people.  A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish, even though the latter supposedly has 3x the market share.  So either, for some reason, everyone who uses this site isn't telling anyone, or these aren't real users. 

Since this isn't a porn site, it seems unlikely that the audience here would be so silent, so it's probably the case that these aren't real users.  That doesn't explain, however, all the clicks.  If these were bot clicks, Google would have picked up on it right away and stopped sending him checks. 

Could he have fooled the Borg?  What are the chances that one dude outsmarted all of Google into believing his phony clickstream?

That seems pretty unlikely, too.  Thousands of people are out there trying to fool Google.  The idea that one dude cracked the code is far-fetched.  Plus, wouldn't he eventually do or say something stupid and get caught?  It's human nature.  If you had tricked Google into paying you millions per year, wouldn't you just be bursting to tell someone?

Of course.  That's how I came to my next conclusion:  Markus doesn't actually know the clicks are fradulent. 

Wha?

Yes, that's right.  He's totally unaware.  Remember what George Costanza said.  It's not a lie if you believe it. 

It's too good a secret not to get out.  Someone else is generating all the fake clicks.

But who?  Who would have any interest in having a site get fairytale-like traffic and click numbers out of a service that looks like a 9 year old built it?  Who could possibly benefit from a story of someone making millions from Google Adsense?  Not only that, but who would have the sheer brain power on hand to create an undectable army of clicking bots that model human behavior so much that they dupe Google's own servers?  It wouldn't be enough to just have the brainpower, though--you'd need extensive data models on how real users actually behave on real sites. 

Who might have that...

...unless...

...nah...

Yup.  Google itself.  The story of Markus Frind is better than any PR Google could possibly buy.  What's even more amazing is how it happened.

Such a plan would have to be held to a very small number of Google engineers and PhDs (And you wonder why Google has so many PhDs in the first place...).  It might actually have to be abstracted away from them, too.  They might have to think they were running some kind of simple, more mundane task... because, again, such a story would find it's way out if it got out to too many people.  No, each engineer would have to think what they were doing was pretty harmless.

That's where Steven Johnson's book, Emergence, kicks in.  It tells the story of very simple software programs that were meant to mix and match with each other to create smarter offspring, using simple survival of the fittest tactics.  By design, strong traits survived and weaker ones didn't. 

Under the guise of "testing" their click fraud conrols, Google unleashed millions, even billions, of tiny little bots out on the web, clicking away--little testers that could be divided up among all these PhDs and engingers so well that none of them would ever suspect a thing.  You've even seen them--random one-offs from sites you've never heard of showing up in your server logs.  The ones that get caught clicking die right away.  The ones that don't get caught have time to run into other little clickbots and they spawn... again, and again, and again. 

Eventually, given the millions of combinations of bots, they get smarter and smarter, until one day, one set of bots at a given site gets so smart, it disappears--seemlessly blending into that site's real traffic, and eventually dwarfing it, but all the while looking completely legitimate to the owner, traffic trackers, and even to Google itself.

Yup...  What you have with Plenty of Fish is nothing short of monkeys typing Shakespeare--a site whose audience is mostly made up of incredibly intelligent--almost sensient--clickbots.  The bots, not unlike a fantasy franchise league, have even started generating new profiles, pulling names, photos, etc, from other places, each with their own distinct clicking behavior.  They've even started plugging into the Aviary API to start creating photos of entirely new people that have never been seen before.

So there you have it.  Markus Frind isn't intentially a fraud--he's just the completely random and unsuspecting winner of the Google emergent  intellience clickbot spawn lottery.  Only through reason and logic could we uncover this--knowing that no matter what the stats say, we all know there aren't nearly as many actual real life humans using the site as we think, and knowing that only Google itself, and not Markus, could have the werewithal to unleash this situation. 

Let's just hope this machine city of cyberdating bots sticks to the personals and doesn't have any intention of clicking over to the Department of Defense website. 

"...there are now thousands of little lightweight web services out there created by people who aren't in the business of building businesses. They are programmers experimenting in their free time. Maybe they're trying to promote their services. Maybe they just needed to solve a problem that only they had, without much concern as to whether or not anyone esle had it. These apps serve a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but that doesn't make them all businesses. Bubbles happen when we don't see the difference and we start funding (and overfunding) the projects."

I'm off eHubwatch!! | from This is going to be BIG! - Comments on New York Tech Community, Startups, Venture Capital and Career Education

There are a lot of reasons a university could come up with for not participating in existing social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.  You can't really authenticate people or control the messaging.  You might be exposed to illegal activities of the students. 

For a few years now, those of us who build communities online for a living have touted all the benefits of participation--how they could engage their constituencies better, increase their reach, etc.  It's largely fallen on deaf ears.

Well, today, we now have a reason why universities absolutely must participate fully on existing social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook--to protect their communities.

Brad Ward, who is the Electronic Communication Coordinator (does your school even have this position??) in Butler University's Office of Admission, uncovered a marketing scheme that should be the turning point of schools' aversion to participation on Facebook.  College Prowler, a college guide publishing company, created hundreds of "Class of 2013" Facebook groups geared to individual colleges in order to "catch" incoming students after gaining admission--in order to be able to market to them later.

You see, when students decide on a college, one of the first things they're likely to do is to join the Facebook networks and groups of their new school.  They search for groups on Facebook, and without paying much attention to who is running the group, they join up.  Once the numbers start climbing, these groups seem more and more legitimate, furthering momentum of signups.  In the end, 250+ groups were created by the company, giving them the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of students. 

The point here is that by not participating on these networks in any kind of coordinated, official manner, these schools created a vacuum that was taken up by marketers looking to co-opt these communities for business purposes.

If your school does not have official groups that you or an affiliate manages (and promotes!!) then groups will pop up.  Who will create them?  Anyone and everyone, if you're not present. 

Some schools, by tiptoeing into the social networking waters through closed, white label social networks, have made the problem even worse.  By consentrating all their efforts in one place, they've exposed themselves to the business risk of dealing with exclusive providers.  For example, it is rumored (and confirmed if you spend enough time on LinkedIn) that Affinity Circles is cutting staff. 

Hundreds of schools and associations, often instead of participating (and diversifying) across networks that already exist, depend on this venture backed startup as their main networking tool for alumni.  Hundreds of hours of integration, thousands of dollars spent on marketing--where does it all go if the company goes under?  Trust me, as an entrepreneur currently experiencing this venture capital market, if your school isn't asking Affinity Circles "How much staff did you cut?  Why?  How much money is left in the company?  What is your burn rate?" then you could very well be sitting on a time bomb.

For a school that participates everywhere their alumni do--on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, on their own official school blog, etc--this wouldn't be as much of an issue.  When alumni have multiple potential touchpoints to connect with their school, if one of them doesn't work out, you're not completely cut off. 

Butler is really lucky to have a guy like Brad working for them--someone who understands social networks and helps you create an innovative strategy for active and positive participation on them in a way that is engaging, but also covers all the bases that schools need covered.  If your school doesn't have that in house, perhaps it's time to invest in a good consultant who understands how schools work and who actively participates in all these networks.

Hmm... too bad I have a fulltime gig.  As an adjunct professor, active blogger, Facebooker, Twitterer, LinkedIn guy, and organizer of alumni, after stories like these, there's a huge opportunity here to help schools out with their social media strategy. 

Pics and clips from an awesome impromptu tech community snowball fight at the Shake Shack at Madison Square Park.  Props to the Shake Shack employees who participated in the fight and also gave us some hot chocolate.

Alex and I and our ill-fated attempt to charge the line.

You can call in (646-929-1686) or check out the show online...   be there!

Topic:

With over 2700 blog subscribers, 1700 Twitter followers, 1000+ LinkedIn connections, and 600+ Facebook friends, not to mention IM buddies, 100+ blogs in my RSS reader, and 3000+ e-mails in my address book, you'd think I'd be a bit overloaded!

I'm going to talk about how I "manage" all of these and also take some questions around the following...Friend everyone or keep a velvet rope? Can you develop authentic relationships at scale? Where does networking cross the line to self promotion?